Technology for the 2 meter office (6 feet office)

The floor plan shows our 4 offices with a total of 14 workstations - the three rooms above the corridor and the one at the top right of the picture. I'll ignore the meeting rooms for the moment.

With social distancing measures, we now have 6 out of 14 workstations available.

Managing job scarcity

As you would expect from a technology company, we support remote working in every way. That is why we have always had relatively few workstations for our employees. We have one workstation for every 1.5 employees. The social distancing measures reduce the number of available workstations by more than 60% to one for every 4 employees.

While all of our employees are technically able to work from home, there are still a number of personal and professional reasons why it makes sense to work from the office.

As an employee, how do I know whether I will have a job in the office tomorrow?

Due to the high number of employees per workstation, it can quickly happen that too many employees want to be in the office at the same time and there is not a secure workstation available for everyone. To prevent this, we use our own product and book workstations quickly and easily via an app. This is incredibly quick to set up and only takes seconds for employees. This means that everyone at our company can know whether there are any social distancing-compliant workstations available.

Here I show you how to select and reserve a workstation from the floor plan in our office in 15 seconds:

We currently still have permanently assigned jobs. How do we communicate a change in the workplace model in the middle of the crisis? Do we even want to introduce flex desking?

The coronavirus crisis has already established a new workplace model: almost 100% home office. In my view, it is now a matter of offering a better workplace model than the one de facto enforced by corona. A comparison with the workplace world before coronavirus may be emotionally understandable, but it misses the reality of the current situation.

We advise our customers, especially those with several large locations, to gradually introduce bookable workstations.

1. Step: Offer workstations in the office: Once a number of workstations have been identified where work can be done, these are offered to a group of employees. For example, a group of 500 employees can use 50 desks in the office by booking them themselves. No one has to use this, but it is an option that many do not have today and may very well welcome. Booking via app allows self-organization and therefore produces little overhead for the administration.

2. Step: Measurements: As soon as a booking is made, data is collected. How well is the offer accepted? Do 50 of the 500 employees consistently want to go to the office? Are there far fewer? Are there many more? How satisfied are the employees who can come to the office? As the current situation is new to us all, this kind of reliable and concrete data is key to informing the strategy to revitalize the offices.

3. Step: Adapt: The data will quickly show the direction in which the office needs to evolve. If it is not accepted, it can be analyzed why this is the case and other approaches can be tried out. However, if the offer is well received, more workstations should be made available in this way. It is then important to observe whether the social distancing discipline is being adhered to and whether additional measures need to be introduced. And these would then, of course, be measured again.

Clean used desks

Viruses can remain on some surfaces for several days and pose a risk of infection. To minimize this risk, workstations should be cleaned thoroughly every day. In order to keep the effort involved reasonable, the surfaces that are actually used should be cleaned first.

Thing-it has developed a priority-based control system for cleaning staff for this purpose. In this control system, the scheduling of cleaning staff is based on information in Thing-it, e.g. which workstation was booked or - see below - at which workstation occupancy was measured.

In addition, the switch to flexible workstations in combination with a "clean desk policy" means that workstations have drastically better hygiene values. Some permanently assigned workstations apparently have hygiene values that are worse than those of WCs - at least according to HOK's Kay Sargent in the following article: Isolation will force office rethink

Switching to dynamic cleaning only works in cooperation with the cleaning service provider. All German cleaning companies, some of which we have been working with for years, are open to this change. There are certainly technological and organizational issues that need to be clarified, such as data protection or technical equipment, but these can easily be mastered against the backdrop of the current crisis. We are happy to provide support in clarifying these issues.

Measure the occupancy of workstations

It may be worth investing in sensor-based occupancy measurement in addition to booking. The reasons for this are:

1. Misuse can be detected with sensors.

2. Empty bookings can be prevented.

3. Areas to be cleaned can be determined more precisely.

4. Future space requirements can be determined.

Hardware options

There is a wide range of hardware available for measuring the utilization of workstations. Some buildings, such as the cube berlin, The Ship Cologne or our locomotive shed, are already equipped with systems that allow usage to be recorded. These systems include, for example wtec's smartengine or also Vossloh-Schwabe's Blue2Light.

In the vast majority of offices today, however, no sensor technology is installed; it has to be retrofitted as a retrofit solution. This means that sensors are only installed for the purpose of workplace analysis and not as part of a new build or major renovation.

In our experience, the following aspects are very important when selecting hardware for a retrofit:

1. No cable necessary: The cost of cabling often exceeds the cost of the sensors many times over. Retrofits must therefore use sensors that do not require cables.

2. No need to change batteries: The number of sensors required can quickly run into the thousands. Battery faults and high sensor consumption can result in very high maintenance costs, so that in the worst case scenario, people are only sent to replace batteries.

Two technologies that fulfill these requirements are:

1. EnOcean Multisensor: Power is supplied via a PV cell on the sensor and the data is transmitted via EnOcean radio to a gateway, from where Thing-it receives it.

2. Disruptive Technologies temperature sensor: The power supply is ensured by an internal battery with a shelf life of between 5 and 15 years, the sensor transmits the data to the Disruptive Technologies Cloud via a Cloud Gateway, from where it is sent to Thing-it.

In both cases, Thing-it can derive from the sensor data whether a workstation is occupied or not and use this in a variety of ways, e.g. for a "live" display. The red dots in the display below represent occupied workstations.